Don Schaefer's List: Advocacy

"The President’s “sequester” offer slashes non-defense spending by $830 billion over the next ten years. That happens to be the precise amount we’re implicitly giving Wall Street’s biggest banks over the same time period."

"Before the global financial crisis, income inequality was relegated to the underworld of economics. The motives of those who studied it were impugned. According to Martin Feldstein, the former head of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, such people must have been motivated by envy. Robert Lucas, a Nobel prize winner, thought that "nothing [is] as poisonous" to sound economics as "to focus on questions of distribution.""

"The fanatics in the GOP have to be held accountable or they’ll continue to hold the nation hostage to their extremism. Even if it takes until the 2014 midterms to loosen their hold, the cost is worth it."

"While the rule making will speed up, the core problems with the financial system and its regulators are deeper than personnel and sadly impervious to which party occupies the White House. They are bipartisan and structural.

The examples of bipartisan cowardice and ineptitude are legion, but one of the most telling involves a particularly dispiriting disappointment of Ms. Schapiro's tenure at the S.E.C.: the failure to figure out a solution for money market funds, which are able to mask their risk under the current rules. It was a shared fumble, with a Democratic commissioner joining Republicans in proposing more study of the topic in order to issue a report calling for more study."

"The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office on Thursday warned that the automatic tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to start in January amount to too much deficit reduction, too soon. They'd put the economy back into recession, and push unemployment to about 9 percent. But the CBO also warned of an economic crisis ahead if the United States doesn't stem the growth of the nation's exploding deficit.

Get it? Reduce the budget deficit too quickly, and we're in trouble. But fail to address the deficit, and we're also in trouble. It's really a matter of timing. That's why I think any deal should include a trigger mechanism that begins to cut spending and raise taxes when the economy has two consecutive quarters of 6 percent unemployment or less, and 3 percent annualized growth or more.

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"Kurt Eichenwald writes of the presidential briefings that came before the well-known August 6 warning "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," concluding that "the administration's reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed." That included a warning from the CIA on May 1 that "a group presently in the United States" was planning to strike and one on June 22 that an attack could be "imminent.""

"...The charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic -- is regarded in Israel and the
United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in
recent years, that is because it is now the only card left. The habit of tarring any foreign
criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel
Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli
leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of
Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for
fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews
everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in
the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has
seized -- but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" -- it is in effect
saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli
occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't
like Jews. In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion:
Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now
the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia..."

The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”

Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.

That George W. got special treatment at a time when draftees were likely to end up slogging through the jungles of Viet Nam shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to anyone who knows how America routinely gives special treatment to the offspring of the 1%. What did come as a surprise was why George W. stopped flying and that he apparently did so with the tacit approval of his commanding officers in TANG, who who viewed Bush's move to Alabama to work on Winton "Red" Blount's campaign for the U.S. Senate as the the Junior Bush's effective departure from their unit and apparently from his 6 year obligation to the National Guard as well.

Slowly but surely the courts are recognizing that recording on-duty police is a protected First Amendment activity. But in the meantime, police around the country continue to intimidate and arrest citizens for doing just that. So if you’re an aspiring cop watcher you must be uniquely prepared to deal with hostile cops.

If you choose to record the police you can reduce the risk of terrible legal consequences and video loss by understanding your state’s laws and carefully adhering to the following rules.

This week, everyone in the art world is talking about Morley Safer’s recent report on 60 Minutes about art: the hot commodity. In the wake of his search for art seems valuable enough to spend thousands and millions of dollars on, we learn of the early passing of Thomas Kinkade. Often compared to Disney or Norman Rockwell, Mr. Kinkade sold more canvases in his lifetime that any other, and he redefined high art as a mass produced object for everyone.

First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. He did once say that a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket” — an unfortunate word choice. But saying that such a system would raise energy prices was just a factual statement, not a declaration of intent to punish American consumers. The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.

And it’s a lie wrapped in an absurdity, because the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.

Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. In the Arab world, Iran is disliked but seen as a threat only by a very small minority. Rather, Israel and the U.S. are regarded as the pre-eminent threat. A majority think that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons: In Egypt on the eve of the Arab Spring, 90 percent held this opinion, according to Brookings Institution/Zogby International polls.

Midway Studios Ops-Core issue

urns out yesterday would have been Ronald Reagan's 101st birthday. In all the excitement over the tsunami of Santorum that engulfed the country, it plumb got right by me. So, let me say, in my own belated way, and because behind-the-times was the basis for Reagan's entire career, happy birthday, ya silly old coot.

How do you like your party now, Ronnie? A Mormon everyone hates, a world-historical balloon animal 10 years past his sell-by date, a survivalist crank from Texas, and a guy who is pretty much a dick. That's the party you and your boys created. That's the end product of the "conservative movement" of which you were the amiable and occasionally coherent figurehead, a prop in your own life. You know how you know that's the case, Ronnie? Look how hard they're trying to memorialize you in concrete and marble. They stuck your name on National Airport, and on the biggest and ugliest building in Washington, D.C., to celebrate your devotion to smaller government. What was it that Bogart said in that detective movie?

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

You taught us that "deficits don't matter." (Dick Cheney himself reminded us of that.) You sold missiles to the terrorist-sponsoring mullahs in Iran so you could sponsor our own priest-slaughtering terrorists in Central America, thereby laying the groundwork for all the secret deceptions in foreign policy that led to the Iraq war, which was designed and launched by some of your own old Iran-Contra hands, and thereby also laying the groundwork for the destructive increase in presidential power that continues (alas) to this day, under a Democratic president.